Trump held a meeting of pharmaceutical company CEOs, one of whom fainted.  Trump stood there while others laid the guy out, treated him for fainting, and he was taken out by medics — okay, just fainted.

Meanwhile, Trump stood there until aides led him out of the office.

This man is trash.  Just trash.  I was born and reared in rural Mississippi, worked in West Virginia coal country.  I know trash when I see it.

 

“Behold. The festering carcass of American rot shoved into an ill-fitting suit: the sleaze of a conman, the cowardice of a draft dodger, the gluttony of a parasite, the racism of a Klansman, the sexism of a back-alley creep, the ignorance of a bar-stool drunk, and the greed of a hedge-fund ghoul—all spray-painted orange and paraded like a prize hog at a county fair.

Not a president. Not even a man. Just the diseased distillation of everything this country swears it isn’t but has always been—arrogance dressed up as exceptionalism, stupidity passed off as common sense, cruelty sold as toughness, greed exalted as ambition, and corruption worshiped like gospel.

It is America’s shadow made flesh, a rotting pumpkin idol proving that when a nation kneels before money, power, and spite, it doesn’t just lose its soul—it shits out this bloated obscenity and calls it a leader.”

After Democrats ran the table in Tuesday’s elections, Mike Johnson said on Wednesday that the catastrophic losses for Republicans did not say “anything about Republicans at all.” Hallelujah! Let’s hope that all Republicans continue to tell themselves that lie all the way to the ballot box on November 3, 2026.

Republicans went down in flames on Tuesday because they refused to acknowledge that “We aren’t in 2024 anymore.” Instead, they remain hopelessly stuck in the 2024 election results, believing that the temporary gains Trump made in some constituencies in 2024 are permanent.

Wrong! Election Day 2025 proved that the ground has shifted dramatically—like the transition from monochrome to Technicolor as Dorothy and Toto stepped into Oz. But instead of saying, “Toto, I don’t think we are in 2024 anymore,” Mike Johnson and Donald Trump pretended that “Nothing has changed; the results have nothing to do with Trump; we won’t change our message or agenda.” Indeed, Trump reacted to his drubbing at the ballot box by threatening voters with a shutdown of air traffic! Smart move, Donald! That will make voters like you more. (Not!)

While we can’t count on Republicans to defeat themselves, if their strategic response to the shellacking on Tuesday is to pretend that it is “business as usual” in the Trump regime, they are granting Democrats a generational gift that we should exploit to maximum advantage.

But regardless of what Republicans do, Democrats must continue their chosen path, which proved to be a winning message on Tuesday: Defending democracy and protecting the health, economic security, dignity, and personal liberty of all Americans.

I was speaking to a friend on Wednesday who said that my newsletter after the election was more “measured” than that of other commentators (an observation, not a criticism). I hope that my effort to place Tuesday’s victories in the broader context of our year in the wilderness did not detract from the rightful joy and pride that Democrats should be experiencing at this moment.

The victories were tremendous. They were so overwhelming that Trump could not muster the gall to claim that the results were “rigged.” Instead, he blamed “Republicans,” forgetting that he is the dark overlord of the Republican Party who enforces message discipline with cold-blooded vengeance. There were many winners and losers on Tuesday, but the biggest loser was Donald Trump.

In a pathetic attempt to escape responsibility, Trump noted that he was “not on the ballot,” implying that the results would have been different if his name were on every ballot. Not so. Even Trump’s corporate cheerleader, the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board, wasn’t buying what Trump was selling. See WSJ Editorial, Trump Really Was on the Ballot.

Per the WSJ Editorial Board,

President Trump on Wednesday blamed Tuesday’s Republican election defeats on the government shutdown and the fact that he wasn’t on the ballot. If he really believes this, the GOP is heading for bigger problems in 2026.

The victories were so significant that they “changed the electoral landscape,” Robert Hubbell, Today’s Edition, November 5, 2025.

What did I mean by that statement? Republicans are busily redrawing congressional districts in an effort to gerrymander their way into retaining the House in 2026. But their depraved scheme is based on a logical fallacy: They are revising the 2026 congressional districts based on 2024 electoral results. That is a mistake. A big one.

Kate Riga of Talking Points Memo identified the Republican dilemma in her analysis, In First Chance For Voters to React to Trump II, All Kinds of Democrats Steamrolled Republicans.

Riga wrote,

The risk in drawing aggressive gerrymanders, as Republicans did in a few red states and plan to do in several more, is that your candidates inherently get put in more competitive districts. In wave elections, those newly vulnerable lawmakers can get swept away. [¶]

If Tuesday is a sign of where the midterm winds are blowing, the Republican gerrymanders may lead to bigger Democratic gains — on top of the big Democratic (Gavin Newsom) win, as voters approved a defensive California gerrymander by almost 64 percent.

Using the 2024 results to slice and dice congressional districts makes sense if the coalition Trump built in 2024 is a permanent one. It is not—as Tuesday’s results showed.

First, as many commentators have noted, the scale of the victories was remarkable. Turnout was high, winning margins were high, and enthusiasm was high. Those factors suggest that a “safe” Republican district leaning “R+8” in 2024 might be a “toss-up” in 2026.

But it gets better for Democrats and worse for Republicans. Much.

Second, swing voters shifted decidedly in favor of Democrats. See Vox, 2025 election results: The VA and NJ races point to a nightmare scenario for the GOP.

Per Vox,

Polls had anticipated Democratic victories in Tuesday’s major gubernatorial races. But they drastically underestimated the scale of the Democrats’ success. The party appears to have both engineered exceptionally high turnout among its base for off-year elections — and won a significant number of swing voters.

Third, Latino voters have also shifted strongly against Trump—fueled by a mixture of regression to the mean, revulsion at the inhuman treatment of Latino immigrants by ICE, and by a sense of betrayal over Trump’s failed promises to improve the economy for people who work for a living. See Vox, Republicans may have a Latino problem (again)

In no place was that more clear last night than in New Jersey, where exit polls suggest that Democratic Gov.-elect Mikie Sherrill won nearly 70 percent of Latino voters, compared to the 31 percent who sided with Republican Jack Ciattarelli.

That’s a huge reversal: Trump got within 6 points of winning the state in 2024, largely with the help of Black and Latino voters who swung for him across the state.

Latino voters seemed to have turned out at higher-than-expected rates, and mostly returned to the Democratic side.

See also, NYT, Republicans Point Fingers After Their Losses, but Not at Trump,

[E]arly county-level results suggested that Republicans did not hold the gains that Mr. Trump made in 2024 with young men and Latino and Black voters. Places like Perth Amboy, N.J., a heavily Hispanic city Mr. Trump lost by just nine percentage points last year, delivered a 50-point margin for Ms. Sherrill.

As noted by the Times, there was a 41-point swing away from Trump/GOP in 2024 to Mikie Sherrill/Democrats in a “heavily Hispanic city” in 2025. The plural of “anecdote” is not “data,” but the evidence is mounting that Trump’s gains among Latino voters in 2024 are evaporating.

Fourth, it is not just Latino voters who are reversing their 2024 shift toward Trump. As the NYT article above notes, the same shift was observed among “young men and Black voters.” See CNN, The most striking stats of the 2025 election.

As explained by CNN, Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill won among men under the age of 30 by strong margins—15 and 14 percentage points, respectively. In 2024, Trump and Kamala Harris split the under-30 male demographic evenly. A 15-point swing in favor of Democrats in 2025 is significant—especially given the high turnout in both races.

There are more shifts in the electorate that will become clearer as exit polling is released over the next few days. However, here’s the key takeaway: On election night 2025, Trump’s gains among independents, Latinos, males under 30, and Black voters disappeared by substantial margins in high-turnout elections. Given that Trump’s victory in 2024 was razor-thin, the collapse of his winning coalition bodes well for Democrats in 2026.

President Donald Trump’s angry response to corruption questions at the end of his 60 Minutes interview was cut from the show’s TV and online edits.

CBS aired a 28-minute version of the Trump interview on television, and then released a 73-minute extended cut online, which was also shared by the White House’s RapidResponse 47 X account. Neither contained Trump losing his cool over questions about the billionaire he pardoned after a $2 billion crypto deal was struck with the Trump family.

The MAGA social media account claimed it was the “FULL” Trump interview that came “without the network’s edits and cuts.” An editor’s note on 60 Minutes’ YouTube upload of the extended interview said it was “condensed for clarity.”

However, the full tense exchange over crypto corruption with interviewer Norah O’Donnell, which can be seen in the transcript on the 60 Minutes Overtime site, did not appear in either the TV or the extended online video version.

HERE IS A LINK TO 60 MINUTES OVERTIME WHERE YOU CAN READ THE TRANSCRIPT OF THE FULL INTERVIEW — HIS RANT IS AT THE BOTTOM OF THE PAGE, AT THE END OF THE INTERVIEW.  TRUMP IS A LYING PIECE OF SHIT.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/read-full-transcript-norah-odonnell-60-minutes-interview-with-president-trump/

As the 2025 Virginia campaign season winds to a close, not surprisingly we had rallies by Democratic and Republican candidates yesterday. The main Democratic rally, with somewhere between 7,000 and 8,000 in attendance, was in Norfolk, starring former President Barack Obama – see here for video, highlights, etc. And, as you can see from that Norfolk rally, Democrats are focused on moving Virginia forward, making Virginians’ lives better, fighting back against the assault on democracy coming from Donald Trump and Republicans, working to realize – as former President Obama said – “this nation’s true revolutionary spirit…that ‘we the people’ means what we say…our commitment to a common creed…that’s what made us special.” Great stuff, in other words.

In SHARP contrast, see below for a couple video snippets from last night’s Republican rally in Purcellville. First, here’s VA GOP Lt. Governor nominee John Reid, who was a far-right/MAGA radio host (not just a generic “radio personality” or whatever the media whitewashes him as) for many years:

“And Ghazala, outside of her basement, I don’t know where she’s been. That’s why I had to do the world’s first artificial intelligence debate, which I hope you
watched. And the weird thing was the AI bot was kind of better than her in real life, I think. But she has beaten me up because she’s raised $8 million from the same people who are supporting Zohran Mamdani in New York. And you know, I’m a nice guy. I don’t like to be mean. But you know what that means? The socialists and the radical Islamists who are on the march in America are behind Zohran Mamdani in New York and they’re behind Ghazala Hashmi in Virginia. We cannot let that be successful in this state.”

Not subtle at all here; just blatant, nasty Islamophobia. Note the link that Reid draws between Ghazala Hashmi and Zohran Mamdani (exaggerated pronunciation, clearly to emphasize the “foreign” nature of Zoh-ran MAMDANI’s name), as well as the fear mongering about “socialists” and “‘radical Islamists who are on the march in America.” Of course, “radical Islamists” aren’t in any way/shape/form “on the march in America,” but even if that were the case – which, again, IT IS NOT – how on earth does that make a liberal Democrat (and super-nice person) like Ghazala Hashmi a “radical Islamist” – or a “socialist” for that matter? Anyway, you can see what Reid’s doing here, and it ain’t pretty.

Next, we’ve got Glenn Youngkin, who the media ASSURED us constantly in 2021 (and beyond) was a “nice guy in a sweater vest,” a “suburban dad” and a “moderate” – all of which was absurd at the time, but has gotten far more ridiculous as we’ve watched Youngkin’s inner MAGA/Trumpist/far-right-extremist side emerge over the past four years.  And that hard-right transition is exemplified by Youngkin’s ugly speech last night. Check it out, below.

“…to demonstrate that we are going to reject political violence and we’re going to send Jay Jones back where he belongs, which possibly could be jail. That’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to reject Abigail Spanberger and send her back where she belongs, which  is…how about back home? Just go back home!  And we are gonna reject Ghazala Hashmi, because she is the most liberal leftist member of our General Assembly. And I got to tell you what folks, I don’t want her anywhere. I don’t even want her in the state. This is what we have to get done.”

Again, that is just UGLY – nativist, Islamophobic, xenophobic, authoritarian, you name it. Yet, disturbingly, THIS is what the party that used to be led by people who held out America as a beacon of liberty, a “shining city on the hill” which welcomed people from all over the world, etc. has morphed into. Implying that Ghazala Hashmi isn’t just as American as every other American because of her name? religion? ethnicity? To the contrary, as Hashmi said in her response to last night’s Republican viciousness (see her statement, below):

“I have lived in Virginia for over 30 years; my daughters were born and raised right here in Richmond. I am not surprised — but will not be deterred — by the bigotry from our Governor. Ghazala Hashmi is an American name. On Tuesday, we will show him what Virginia stands for.”

And as State Senator Schuyler VanValkenburg put it:

“Sad to see the @GovernorVA saying things like this. We can fight passionately about the issues without questioning how much we love (or belong) in Virginia. A campaign that knows it’s going to lose is resorting to rhetoric that is beneath them.”

True, but the sad thing is this is EXACTLY who Glenn Youngkin – and his role models like Ron DeSantis, Donald Trump, etc. – are.  In two days, Virginians have a GREAT opportunity to send a loud-and-clear message that we strongly, without equivocation, REJECT the unAmerican viciousness national and Virginia Republicans are spewing out there. So make sure you vote Democratic up and down the ballot, and remind everyone you know to do the same. As former President Obama said yesterday: “If nothing else, the last 9 months should have cured us of that idea [that elections don’t matter.]…elections DO matter – and they matter for you!”

Matthew Boedy was targeted by Turning Point USA in 2016 and listed on its “professor watchlist” after speaking up against allowing concealed guns on college campuses. As one of the foremost experts on Turning Point USA and its founder and CEO Charlie Kirk, Boedy exposes their role in perpetuating Christian nationalism in the United States and the threat to democracy they pose. With a background in journalism, an MFA in creative writing, and a PhD in rhetoric, he is a dynamic and experienced scholar whose first book, Speaking of Evil, explored the evolving rhetoric surrounding evil. Boedy currently teaches rhetoric and composition courses at the University of North Georgia and lives in Gainesville, Georgia, with his wife and two daughters.

About his book, The Seven Mountains Mandate: Exposing the Dangerous Plan to Christianize America and Destroy Democracy:

“A sobering assessment of the evolution of Christian nationalism.” –Publishers Weekly

Exposing the decades-long plan to radically transform America, from Bill Bright and Loren Cunningham’s 1975 “seven mountains” vision to Charlie Kirk’s 2020 praise of Donald Trump for embracing it, The Seven Mountains Mandate reveals how prosperity preachers and political operatives are destroying democracy under Trump’s second administration.

The movement to install a populist strongman in the White House with a game plan for enforcing right-wing policies and catering to evangelical Christians started well before Donald Trump’s first candidacy. For decades, a well-funded network of religious and political operatives has been quietly working to dismantle democracy and replace it with Christian theocracy. Their strategy? The seven mountains mandate—a plan to seize control of seven key pillars of American society and reshape the nation.

Scholar Matthew Boedy exposes how this movement—driven by prosperity preachers, extremist politicians, and right-wing power brokers—laid the groundwork for Trump’s presidency and is now advancing its agenda under his second administration. From local school board elections to billion-dollar megachurches, this multipronged effort is reshaping the country in ways most Americans don’t even realize. Discover what has motivated the key players in this movement, how they’ve operated, and what is the unprecedented role of millennial “kingmaker” Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA and the new face of Christian nationalism and the seven mountains movement, who believes that “we finally have a president who understands the seven mountains of cultural influence.”

Today’s news is so much more than the scattershot orders of an extreme administration. With Project 2025 policies in motion, the seven mountains movement is closer than ever to its goal of turning America into a Christian nationalist state. Leaders of this movement have been playing a long game, undermining democracy to establish a theocracy, but it’s not too late to halt their progress and reverse the tide. This book reveals what’s happening behind the scenes—and what you can do to stop it.

“How long? Not long.”

“How long will justice be crucified, and truth bear it?”
“I come to say to you this afternoon, however difficult the moment, however frustrating the hour, it will not be long, because ‘truth crushed to earth will rise again.’
“How long? Not long, because ‘no lie can live forever.’
“How long? Not long, because ‘you shall reap what you sow.’
“How long? Not long:
“ ‘Truth forever on the scaffold,
“Wrong forever on the throne,
“Yet that scaffold sways the future,
“And, behind the dim unknown,
“Standeth God within the shadow,
“Keeping watch above his own.’ “
——  Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., “How Long? Not Long,” March 25, 1965

My friend was focused on the lengths the administration and MAGA Congress are going to keep the Epstein scandal files hidden. I noted that innocent people never try to hide the truth, while guilty people will do anything and everything to hide it. “How long,” he asked, “do you think they can keep it hidden?” My mind went to James Russell Lowell’s poem, “The Present Crisis,” that King often quoted.

https://poets.org/poem/present-crisis

The investigation into the series of crimes we know collectively as “Watergate” seemed to take forever, when I was young. On October 30, 1973, right after the infamous “Saturday Night Massacre,” the House Committee on the Judiciary began holding hearings on the multiple resolutions to impeach Nixon. For seven months, Republicans fought tooth and nail to protect the president. If one watches those hearings – right up to the vote to put the resolution to a full House vote, many Republicans were as obnoxious as those we witness today.

How long? Not long, for we actually have three men in particular who have a plan to expose the toxins in those files with the disinfectant of light. The first is a remarkably talented man, Rep. Jamie Raskin. I note that early on, he connected the Epstein scandal files with those highly classified documents the felon hid at mar-a-lago.

Judge Eileen Cannon has not released the prosecutor’s report on that, because the case could be re-filed once the felon leaves the White House. Mr. Smith’s report on the felon’s insurrection has been released. More recently, we have seen Hakeem Jeffries speak about the Mr. Smith’s second report. This is not a coincidence, for Jeffries understands the manner in which the truth will slowly come to the surface. He knows that the maga republicans are in much the same position as those attempting to protect Nixon, which at the exact same time, damaged their positions in the upcoming mid-term elections.

And now the third man is speaking out, though with restraints. House MAGAs have requested that he speak to them in private. His legal team responded by informing them that Mr. Smith would speak to them in an opening hearing, if the DOJ agrees that he can testify without a threat of sharing information from his second report. Smith would be happy to answer any and all questions from a joint House & Senate public hearing. It is, of course, highly unlikely that either the republicans or especially the DOJ will agree to those conditions.

How long? Not long, because those mid-terms are coming up, and the Democratic Party will soon control that branch of the federal government. This is not to dismiss the severe damage that the administration is doing to our society. Indeed, we see the extreme efforts that Mike Johnson takes to not swear in Adelita Grijalva, purely to protect the felon. Yet in protecting the puppeteer, puppet Johnson ensures his party’s defeat next November.

Like every other good person in this country, I wish that we could have the immediate gratification of seeing shit stains like the felon tried and incarcerated. Yes, I surely do. But as an old man who remembers Watergate, I know I have to be patient. Our turn is coming up, right around the bend. So stay strong, for the truth is straight ahead.